Become a Fan

25 May 2009

I have taken to liking this new--or maybe not so new--genre of trade books I referred to last night at dinner as "pop neurology." It's kind of like pop psychology, but with more attention to neurons and chemicals. This week I read a book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher.

The book itself has multiple commitments. At times Gallagher sounds like an English major, quoting from Poe, Emerson, and Milton. At others, she sounds like a philosopher, hewing closely (very) to the writings of William James. At still others, she sounds like cross between a buddhist monk and the master on Karate Kid. And often she sounds like the researcher she is--or used to be (does one every really stop being a researcher?). At any rate, Gallagher does a nice job synthesizing other studies related to attention and the mind, many of which (like the nuns doing puzzles) you will have heard or read about.

But more than that, while the book is a trade book, it manages to maintain its integrity in a way that trade scienc-y books seem to me to struggle to do, lapsing into hyperbole that often begins with the title. But this book, like the title, is elegant and even spare. The length of chapters even seem to take into account what Gallagher has learned about human attention these days. Which is a lot. This book is valuable because it encourages its readers to slow down and focus. There's a touch of technophobia lurking in some chapters, but by and large Gallagher gives people good tips to manage our networked lives. The best part though is that the book isn't simply about developing a machine-like focus, but it urges an almost magical approach to attention, one that combines attention with appreciation, advocates for an eastern way of giving one's self over to the moment, combined with a western way of choosing--very deliberately--what those moments will be, or what will get our attention. The word "rapt" works well to capture that part of the book's mission.

Toward the beginning of the book, Gallagher uses the parlance of bottom-up vs. top-down attention, where bottom-up is the chaotic kind of attention that I often practice during a day at the office, letting an email or a drop-in structure what I'm doing or derail what I'd planned to do. Top-down attention is more commanding in that it refuses to be sidetracked. It struck me while reading that this book would be particularly useful for graduate students who are trying to structure their lives and days around large, looming writing projects and smaller, yet still important duties. And I recommend it confidently because it is both demanding and forgiving, which is what we might all aspire to be as researchers, writers, teachers, and advisors.

17 May 2009

JM makes fun of my love for loops. And here loop is more verby than nouny because I like the kind of loops that involve movement. This preference began with my little running habit, or rather as a reaction to the coaches that made me and my teammates run down and back, down and back, down and back. God, how boring and awful that was: running by the assistant coach with his clip board over and over again, or in college by the scorekeeper's table, the opposing bench, back by the scorekeeper's table and the home bench. Touch, go. Nothing to look at but one wall getting closer, and then the other.

So when I was finished with organized sports, I will tell you that I resisted any sort of down and back or out and back, opting instead--and resolutely so--for loops. For starters, loops offer so much more variation than downs-and-backs. It is possible to avoid a certain hill on the path home, more or less. It is less likely that you will twice encounter the exuberant woman who made you stop your run and take your headphones off so that she could pronounce that you had "two whippets! not one! two!" or any other version of that person who will inevitably comment yet again.

JM and I just finished a lovely loop. We didn't plan it that way, but we set out on foot and with the dogs in search of a root beer float. We headed south to paradiso. They didn't have root beer. Then we headed across campus, through the lingering graduates and their families to stop at my office and print something, then up by the long line of people waiting to have their picture taken by the alma mater in their caps and gowns, then down green street to cold stone creamery. They didn't offer root beer floats. We then went to potbelly's, where JM had to opt for plan B, a vanilla milkshake. After that, we made our way back to the mouse house by cutting through the north quad, across boneyard creek, by university high school. And yet even though our main goal of a root beer float went unfulfilled, we didn't have to walk on the same sidewalk twice. I'm pretty sure the whippets appreciated that. More smells, more discarded food, more whippet fawners, and no embarrassing repeats.

14 May 2009

Joshie just posted a video link over at FB to the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited" from 1982 (sorry I can't embed it), which has meant the tumbling in of some serious high school memories. As my sister can tell you, this was the song I listened to over and over (and over) before every one of my high school games on my walkman or car tape player (depending on whether the game was home or away). My focus song.

In watching the video just now, I realized that while the video renders it as the ultimate going out song, for me the song conjures the long treks to away games, the back of a bus seat in front of me, missing chunks of black rubber, my teammates (like me) wrapped--rapt?--in headphones, my cheerleader friends chattering and shimmering.

Before every one of our games, no matter how important, I was super nervous and keyed-up, and this song helped me to re-interpret those autonomic responses--heart racing, mind darting, sweating--as sheer exuberance rather than fear. This song is largely why I associate the high school portion of my career with utter positivity and happiness (even though objectively I know there was lots of pain and suffering). At some point, my team started running out to this song--in a layup line--and the exuberance spread through the bleachers. I hadn't realized that the song was at that point 5 or 6 or 7 years old. Its liveliness endures; it makes me want to pull on short polyester shorts, long stripey socks, string up my hi-tops and do some passing drills and figure eights with old friends.

10 May 2009

I'm too attached to people here to blog about them, and they know who they are and how much I will miss them when we leave. But it does feel somewhat safer or less daunting to reflect on the materiality--the places and stuff--of Champaign-Urbana.

Like the parking meters next to the Champaign post office that only take pennies. I will miss those. It makes me happy that they're there.

And locker 276 at the Activities and Recreation Center, in the turquoise aisle. It is positioned perfectly in relation to the showers and the bench, and it is always available. I used it today in fact.

And the expresso bikes at the ARC. These have fun video routes and let me track my past rides and race my "ghost." When JM and I discovered that if we chose the same routes we could race each other, oh the delight. I never beat him, though.

And the bike racks next to Lincoln Hall. I have perfected my jump off the curb and no longer need to slow down to curl around for parking. On my dismount I frequently see my colleague Tom standing just outside the door, having a smoke.

And my office, its dusty windows, peeling plaster, 29-year old paint job and all. I have a couple more weeks in it, but with my lovely restored antique sofa on its way to state college, and a big dusty spot where the old (heavy!) lawyer's cases were until we moved them down to cf's office, it's already not the same.

And the Comm office in Lincoln Hall. The door to it is rather heavy and requires some leaning to open it. But behind it are the nicest people in the world, and I will miss their greetings and smiles.

And Gail's house, where we have a writing studies potluck twice a year, for which I can't ever recall having bad weather, and the back yard, in which I have watched many a baby grow into toddlers and then kids, and colleagues' kids into high schoolers.

And the porch next door to the mouse house (C & S's porch). It's
where I'm sitting right now, and it's where I will have spent significant chunks of three transition summers. It has apparently been
raining for awhile, and I only now realized it.

And, well, the house on Michigan Avenue. The one that C found for me, and where she and JT and S joined us for tornado warnings. I will miss them, but I will not miss the tornado warnings. We cleaned out the whole house today, and I cursed the day I bought that bag of peas, an ingredient in the vegan pot pie that S and M and I devoured. The recipe only takes a half cup of peas though, and the open bag stayed in there for over a year, leaking peas everywhere. As I picked them out, chasing some under the stove, I thought about that pie with its warm whole wheat crust and how happy the three of us were when we were eating it.

3. I get to have lunch with a sweet and funny friend at my fave campus lunch spot.

4. JM and I are going to take six huge boxes of books to the p.o. to mail to Powells, and Powells will then give us money in return. We are also going to donate about a hundred and fifty books to the books for prisoners program.

7. I have been reading this interview with our president, who is a very, very, very, very smart man.

8. My dissertating advisees are, as the kids say (or maybe the fact that I am saying it means they are no longer saying it), rocking out. Two have recently won very competitive fellowships, another is making crazy headway on her diss, and another is defending hers on Thursday. Another of these recently bungee jumped from the highest commercial bungee point in the world. And she lived!

02 May 2009

On the flight home from London, I selected the movie Twilight for my personal seat-back viewing pleasure. My niece is bananas about the book series, and the one thing I knew is that the "star" vampire, Edward Cullen, is supposed to be unbearably good looking. Given my abiding love for Buffy, how bad could it be? The answer is not bad at all. Not at all.

When I was telling E! about it, she mentioned a Swedish teen vampire movie called (this is the translation) Let the Right One In. I placed it right at the top of our netflix queue, and we watched it last night. Holy crap, now THAT's a teen vampire movie.

As movies, these probably couldn't be more different. Twilight has a hip, smooth soundtrack, and Let uses a strained, slow piano track. One vampire (Cullen) is pretty much across-the-board good, especially vis-a-vis his human love. The other one, Eli, is more complicated, beginning with the fact that she is only twelve (or as the character puts it "twelve. more or less") and yet wields so much power. Twilight is an expensive production with some crouching-tiger style special effects, which push it toward the fantasy genre, whereas Let relies on jittery loping movements and old-fashioned film speed to render the superhuman ability to move and move stuff, which yanks it over to the horror genre. What's more, Let has English dubbed in, and the lines are read in a rather deadpan fashion with voices that don't always match the characters, which makes it even creepier.

And yet the similarities across the genre are fun to note. They both stage the daily vampire drama of getting just enough to eat but resisting eating the "wrong" thing--something we can all relate to!--against the most mundane and youthful school scenes, the high school parking lot in Twilight, the playground in Let. There's talk of a prom in one and going steady in another. Both feature the most beautiful, fresh-faced main human characters who are far from naive. Both take place in gloomily gorgeous places--the Pacific Northwest and Stockholm. And both leave lingering the unworked-out (unworkoutable?) plot of human versus vampire lives, necessarily out of sync.

If you're looking for rental recs, I can think of a worse weekend activity than a teen vampire weekend fest. Might as well throw in Lost Boys for old time's sake. Here are the trailers for you, in case you want a little... taste.